MassBay Community College will use a $500,000 grant from the governor’s office and Massachusetts Life Sciences Center to create the Center for Therapeutics and Genomics Training. The grant will fund equipment, such as a high-content imaging system to analyze cells and genes, for students in biotechnology, biomanufacturing and biopharma.
The new center will help develop of an array of new credit and non-credit courses in molecular and developmental biology, gene therapy, edible vaccines, genomics, next-generation sequencing technologies and biomanufacturing. Through the center, MassBay also can provide new opportunities for high school students and build a new model of corporate partnerships that will offer regional employee-training programs.
Colorado
Aims Community College has secured a $25,000 grant from the Daniels Fund to provide scholarships for nontraditional students seeking an associate degree.
At Aims, nontraditional students “are such an important part of our communities and our robust northern Colorado job market,” said Aims President Leah L. Bornstein.
North Carolina
Craven Community College can increase the number of nurses it trains thanks to a $150,000 grant from CarolinaEast Medical Center (CEMC). The college will use the funds to secure a new full-time nursing instructor to accommodate for an increase of nursing students on the college’s New Bern campus.
The grant comes after discussions started last year between Kathleen Gallman, chief academic officer and vice president for instruction at Craven, and Rosanne Leahy, CEMC senior vice president for nursing. They talked about the need for more nurses and the feasibility of increasing the college’s current nursing cohort. CEMC often has more than 20 nursing vacancies.
The college will focus on educating nursing students through the Regionally Increasing Baccalaureate Nurses (RIBN) initiative. RIBN is a four-year option that allows nursing students concurrently enrolled at Craven and East Carolina University to complete their associate degree in nursing and bachelor’s degree in nursing.
Craven Community College nursing students participate in an emergency exercise to prepare for situations they will encounter on the job. (Photo: Craven)
Elsewhere in North Carolina, Johnston Community College has received a $283,880 National Science Foundation Advanced Technologies Education (NSF ATE) grant to train technicians in both biotechnology and applied engineering.
The college’s three-year Bio Blend project will blend applied engineering and biotechnology curricula, create a multi-skilled talent pipeline from college to industry, and provide hands-on education in a new simulated drug manufacturing environment at the Johnston County Workforce Development Center. The project is supported by industry partners Grifols and Novo Nordisk.
At the end of the project, a cohort of 15 technicians will be available for hire by June 2022.
Tennessee
Pellissippi State Community College’s new center for math and science got a boost with a $150,000 pledge from UT-Battelle LLC. The college broke ground on the new center on May 15. The 82,000-square-foot building will include 18 classrooms, six computer labs and nine science labs, as well as a teacher education center.
UT-Battelle LLC manages and operates Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) for the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). ORNL partners with Pellissippi State by providing internships to students in a variety of fields. Meanwhile, ORNL operates DOE’s Manufacturing Demonstration Facility not far from Pellissippi State’s Hardin Valley Campus, allowing Pellissippi State students a unique opportunity to see advanced manufacturing and materials science at work.
